I was living downstairs by then. I slept in the room where Granny and Nesma had lived and died. Their things were in storage in the basement, except for Granny’s bed, which was now in Mama’s room, the same room she was born in. We went up to Mama’s floor. I put my key in the door and coerced it until the lock turned. All the locks in the house had problems. Some of them opened backwards, others jammed. Mama refused to change them. She worried the locksmith would change the lock and keep a copy of the keys for himself. I had become skeptical like her. Everyone would cheat you. Uncle would say that corruption and thievery were what made the country. Without those things it would fall apart. A low-lying level of corruption was critical, something like oil on a machine. Dido and he argued about this endlessly. Dido had paced the room the last time it came up, not long before Uncle died. He was adamant. He didn’t participate in this insidious corruption. Anarchy was better. Uncle asked him. Did he tip the parking attendant? The man who helped with his papers at the Mugamma? Dido gestured with his shoulders and hands as if to say, Ridiculous question. Uncle laughed. Dido barked back that it was culture not corruption. He was part of a movement that would take to the streets chanting about being fed up with the status quo. Kifaya, it’s enough. He had tried repeatedly to get me to go with him to the marches, to make a film called Kifaya. I promised I would go one day, but just not that day. Every few weeks he would try again, but I knew that deep down he knew. Activism was in the genes, and if not, it came from upbringing. We are informed by the experiences and behaviors of those around us. Dido loved me, but when he said these things, I could feel his disappointment. I knew I lacked the gene. I was more interested in abstracting experience with my writing and films than representing it. Unless it was the mundane, like a nine-minute short I filmed in a record store downtown. The owner was wary at first. He asked who I was making a film for. Why was I making a film? Who would see it? What would I do with it? Why his shop? He said I could film, then changed his mind. I showed him other films I had made. I went to him again. Again. We drank tea. Eventually he agreed. I filmed. Hours of B roll. A customer comes in with a CD he has bought of Umm Kulthum. He tells the shop owner to go to the second song. He asks him to listen. The song is one hour and forty-four minutes long. It happens in minute twenty-three. The quality isn’t what it should be. He knows Umm Kulthum, and her voice doesn’t crack like it does here. They listen. She is singing at a decibel higher than she should. It lasts a second, maybe it’s intentional? It’s a crack, she lost control. But she never lost control. Is it age? Was it? It’s just a bad recording? It is a bad recording. It must be. They call a man walking by from off the street. What does he think? The café owner next door. The bawab of a building across the alley. Does her voice crack? This is her most famous concert, it can’t be. They play minute twenty-three over and over. They turn to me and ask what I think. In my mind I think that I can just sit there for hours, camera on, listening like them. This was what Dido had meant about placid, I thought.
Uncle had walked into the house and collapsed onto the sofa. He asked me for a glass of water or something fizzy. There was no sign of Mama. He put his neck back and tried to catch his breath. I could tell his heaving was as much about the church as his weight. The police had gone into a village on the outskirts of Cairo and bulldozed a church to the ground overnight. It lacked a permit, they said. In the newspaper there were pictures of Copts protesting, crying, wailing around the rubble. There were also pictures of young men, kūfiyyahs wrapped around their mouths and noses, dust clouding their knees down, arms hurled backwards, or forward, rocks flying through the air. Their faces strained. A friend, a longtime newspaper editor, told me he had never seen anything like it before. In all my years, and I am sixty-one, he said. The youth looked like they were in Gaza. It was the same kind of despair. I told Uncle when he came. I knew he would look and understand. He had been saying all year that it was untenable. La faim. He told me to watch for certain things. The price of tomatoes and okra. If the man carrying the bread on his head as he cycles is whistling or not. If people are watching TV at cafés, or sitting in silence, or debating. If the radio begins to play repeated patriotic songs. Without tomatoes and okra we can’t live, he said. I didn’t like okra but understood. It was prickly on the outside and like slime inside. Deceptive. People consumed it almost daily, scooping it into bread and gulping it down, oblivious to texture. It was the cheapest vegetable. We cooked tomatoes with everything. Every day the opposition newspapers would print a picture of a cart piled high with tomatoes. The price per kilo was hand-drawn on a card in their midst. That summer I set up a camera on a downtown corner each morning and zoomed in from across the street. Carts piled like pyramids. The better tomatoes on top, the bad ones hidden beneath. One minute, three minutes, five. If nobody bothered me, I would have let the camera roll all day. Invariably I was asked to leave. When I asked one cart owner why, he said we all know that tomatoes are politics, he didn’t want any trouble. The prime minister had announced he couldn’t do anything more about the price of tomatoes. He had done everything he could. He also couldn’t do anything about the power cuts and heat, except change the clocks, to put Cairo into a different time zone, on GMT+3. It happened arbitrarily one day. Two days later I found out, when I was late to meet a friend. For others it took a week. Mama had stopped buying tomatoes. She said they were exorbitant and we could do without. I reached for a glass from the cabinet. I poured water from the bottle Mama must have taken out of the freezer at some point in the night. Nobody drank tap water anymore, the government had announced some years ago that it was contaminated, and the fridge was so old it hardly cooled. We would fill the freezer with plastic bottles of water, then take them out and let them sit on the counter and melt through the day.
Uncle and Mama argued that morning. He insisted the demolition proved the government had been behind an attack on a Coptic village that had gone uninvestigated by the state. Mama was adamant it couldn’t be. Her best friend Farida was a Copt and said the government was the only thing protecting them. Mubarak and the Pope were one. It was politics, pure and simple. Uncle turned to me and asked what I thought. All through the summer he had been saying we were on the brink. He told me I had to learn to feel the air change. It was all in the sounds, the way particles moved, echoed. The sounds of the city had shifted. We had sat on the balcony on consecutive Sundays over the entire summer and listened. He pointed to the reverberations of car horns. How the honking had both quieted and intensified, taken on a different impatience. We listened to the voices that echoed in from the streets and across the river. The constant chatter had given way to more abrupt bursts of expression. Something was pacified, followed by discharge. We could make out none of it, but the very tenor had shifted. We also listened for when the sound of the city suddenly stopped. A/Cs and the drone of business and machines and generators would roar and then collapse. For a moment there would be quiet, then the cars and the honking and a rumble would begin. It was a sign of excess, a city over capacity. We were breaking down. It was like a building, Uncle said. Filled beyond measurable proportions, badly wired, with extensions, borrowed power, borrowed pipes. He would look at me and shake his head, say nothing, but I knew what he was thinking. He had said it many times before over the years. This was what my generation was inheriting. It was up to us to mitigate the losses, the mistakes. Uncle tried to hold on to as many of the better memories as he could, many with Granny and Mama on this same balcony, eating mangoes, watermelon, white cheese, watching the Nile and looking out onto the expanse of green fields. It reached the horizon, and seemed to extend further, into the unknown. All we could see now beyond the sliver of Nile and the bushes of the garden were miles of a sepia city, and past that, in a horizon marked by a chalk line of rust red, the informal settlements. They made me think back to when Baba used to take me with him to the factory when I was a child. Back then the roads in the center of town were paved, but once you got to the outskirts of the city, much of it was dirt track. You knew you had come to the city’s end, it was like reaching the edge of the earth, where one line and color and atmosphere ended, and a plunge into something less certain began. Baba would slow as he maneuvered the car down from the tarmac onto the rougher, pebbled tracks. The sprawling tapestry of sepia and unfinished redbrick blocks that now extends for miles was then just desert, or crop. The colors around us changed. As I looked out from the balcony, I remembered all this. Rows and rows of redbrick and concrete buildings, unfinished, not connected in any way to the infrastructure of the built city. It was there, Dido had said, that the fight would erupt. He urged me to read Vertigo. Set in 2030, it was prophetic. Dido spoke of the fight as if he wanted a war, but he was a romantic, and I knew that in his heart what he really wanted was for comrades, dissidents, to unite: raise a flag, occupy the streets, talk about love, peace, revolution. I couldn’t imagine it, but I listened, read Ginsberg and Darwish to him aloud, asked him to describe what came after this utopia he envisioned. What would he do next?